Alan Stewart’s UK and Ireland family history news

We’re not Neanderthal men

The Economist reports on Svante Paabo’s recent announcement of a draft of the Neanderthal genome.

In this article, The Economist reports that so far, Dr Paabo has been able to show, from the overall amount of difference between the DNA of the two species, that the Neanderthal line and that of modern humanity parted company only shortly before the oldest known Neanderthal fossils were alive.

The newspaper adds that Paabo’s research suggests that if there was any interbreeding between Neanderthals and modern humans, this was trivial and is not represented in the modern human population.